Life in Final Fantasy XIV starts like this: You create a character by selecting a race (There are five playable so far.) They are all diverse from the short Lalafell to the hulking Roegadyn. From there, you can customize the… Continue Reading →

Life inFinal Fantasy XIV starts like this: You create a character by selecting a race (There are five playable so far.) They are all diverse from the short Lalafell to the hulking Roegadyn. From there, you can customize the hair, face, height and other characteristics such as moustaches and markings. There’s enough choices to make each avatar distinct.

Afterward, you’ll face your most important choice. You have to be a disciple of one category — war (melee combat), magic (spell casters), land (I’m assuming farming) and hand (crafting) — and this impacts how you play the game. From there, you can get more specific. Disciples of War can have choose from classes such as gladiator, pugilist, archer and lancer. Disciples of Magic have fewer choices, deciding between thermaturgy and conjurer. As for the other disciplines, I didn’t explore them much, but I’ve been told that they’re geared toward crafting.

Once you pick the extranous details such as birthday and sign, you finally make the second-most important decision when it comes to exploring the land of Eorzea. You choose between starting cities such as Gridania and Ul’dah. This determines how your story begins.

At a demo day in San Francisco last week, I chose to play as Lalafell (see vertically challenged guy) named Thestache Fearit because of an exaggerated amount of facial hair. I was a pugilist, which seems to be the equivalent of a monk or martial artist. I started my adventure wandering forested land of Gridania.

My character is walking through the woods when he sees an anomaly in the sky. It’s a black hole with swirling clouds and out of that comes a flying machine. I followed its trajectory and run into two strange characters named Yda, an elfish Elezen pugilist, and Papalymo, a Lalafell conjurer.

They actually arrived on that flying machine and you find them passed out on the ground. That’s when they’re attacked by wolves. This provides a perfect opportunity for combat with Yda and Papalymo as NPC back-ups.

Players can target foes, and by pressing the X key, they can lock on to it. That means they can circle around it, weave in and out attacking and try to move away. To deal damage, I pressed the number keys to activate attacks. The number of Pugilists’ hand-to-hand combat moves are smaller compared to other classes but that’s balanced out by a large stamina bar, which is what limits players from spamming attacks consistently. I used it enough during this tutorial section to survive and move on to the Gridania village proper.

Further on into the demo, I started another character in Ul’dah and ended up with a completely different scenario. I created a Miqo’te conjurer called Catgirl Nukunuku. (I’m a big fan of that anime.) I wanted to get experience with something other than a melee class and I wasn’t disappointed.

The mage classes work similar to the melee except they have a ton more attack options. I had to fight innocuous creatures outside of the desert town of Ul’dah. For the most part, I had a hard time about it. Mage classes aren’t the best for beginners. I usually ended up low on health and running back to the inn or shops for potions.

Comparing it to other MMO controls, it’s fairly similar.

As for the Ul’dah, it’s structured similarly to the Gridania scenario. This time around, my character, Catgirl Nukunuku, enters the desert city on a merchant wagon. She wanders around the cosmopolitan area and sees that same black swirling cloud that my other character noted. But this time, nothing seemed to spew forth. Everything seemed normal until I visited the Ul’dah parade.

It’s here where players get their first taste of combat, when a giant creature called a Goobbue runs amok and attacks the Songstress of the city. I ended up teaming with Thancred, another wanderer passing through Ul’dah.

When it comes down to it, choosing a city opens up a different opening storyline, but the structure for every player is the same. After surviving the initial tutorial battle, players end up at the Adventurer Hall, where they can take on newbie quests and absorb the culture and politics in each place. Gridania is obsessed with Greenwrath and protecting the forest. There’s a mystical side to the place as players hear about how Yda and Papalymo were “summoned by the wood” and ended up in this town.

On the other hand, I got a better sense of the politics of the land in Ul’dah. There’s a sense of an impending conflict and intrigue among the townspeople and merchants.

Lastly, Square Enix let me and a few other gamers party up with some high-level characters. I was a level 40 Roegadyn gladiator. My teammates had comparable avatars, each with a different class. We grouped up (The maximum party size is 15.) and wandered this desert together. The important thing to note is that it’s difficult to solo at this level.

I was killed by a cockatrice and a painted ladybug. (Yes, I know it’s embarrassing.) Once you die, you restart at the last Atelier crystal you visited. You also begin with half the health. It’s a punishment for dying, but that penalty wears off after a couple of minutes.

An interesting thing about the combat is that there are a context-sensitive light points sprinkled through the map. Activating them brings out an enemy and the party will have to kill it. There was also a quest that we tried to do, but being new to this and with the healers getting used to the control system, we pretty much failed. But it was still fun and the world was beautiful with that enemies that could only come from the Final Fantasy franchise.